Partnerships and cooperation for water

The 2023 United Nations World Water Development Report on Partnerships and Cooperation assesses the nature and role of partnerships and cooperation among stakeholders in water resources management and development and their role in accelerating progress towards water goals and targets.

Progress towards SDG 6

Partnerships and cooperation are essential to accelerating progress towards SDG 6 and realizing the human rights to water and sanitation. Safeguarding water, food and energy security through sustainable water management, providing water supply and sanitation services to all, supporting human health and livelihoods, mitigating the impacts of climate change and extreme events, and sustaining and restoring ecosystems and the valuable services they provide, are all pieces of a great and complex puzzle. Only through partnerships and cooperation can the pieces come together. And everyone has a role to play.

"Water is our common future and we need to act together to share it equitably and manage it sustainably. As the world convenes for the first major United Nations conference on water in the last half century, we have a responsibility to plot a collective course ensuring water and sanitation for all."

Audrey AzoulayUNESCO Director-General

Nearly every water-related intervention involves some kind of cooperation. Occurring across local to global scales, through formal and informal arrangements, water partnerships bring together different stakeholders with varying intentions.

Cooperation is critical to achieving all water-related goals and targets. Any acceleration of progress towards the sixth Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 6) depends heavily on the efficient and productive performance of partnerships.

Inclusive stakeholder participation promotes buy-in and ownership. Taking account of the different perspectives of those involved helps determine a clear, shared vision of the objectives, outcomes, and results, based on a common understanding of the problem(s).

What is a partnership or cooperation?

Partnerships are “voluntary and collaborative relationships between various parties, both public and non-public, in which all participants agree to work together to achieve a common purpose or undertake a specific task and, as mutually agreed, to share risks and

responsibilities, resources and benefits” and are often based on some type of formal or

informal agreement. Water cooperation is a less formal practice of “working together to

the same end” towards a common goal to peacefully manage and use freshwater resources at the local, national, regional and international levels.

Intra-sectoral partnerships and cooperation occur between or among stakeholders with a common and specific type of water-related use or objective.
Cross-sectoral (or inter-sectoral) partnership and cooperation, involves actors with different water-related foci and multiple (different or even competing) water-related objectives.
Extra-sectoral partnership and cooperation, involves actors from ‘outside the water domain’, where the primary foci and objectives of some partners are not primarily water-related, but where water plays a determining role.

Partnerships and cooperation for water supply and sanitation

Partnerships and cooperation for food and agriculture

Partnerships and cooperation for water and the environment

Partnerships and cooperation for water and health

Partnerships and cooperation for water and climate change

Partnerships and cooperation for water and industry and energy

Facts and figures

In 2020

26% of the world’s population (2 billion people) did not have access to safely managed drinking water services; 46% (3.6 billion) lacked access to safely managed sanitation

Over 85%

of natural wetland area is already lost and 75% of the land surface significantly altered, reducing the ability of earth’s ecosystems to support sustainable water

Of GDP lost in some countries by 2050 due to water scarcity – spurring migration and conflict

US$650 billion

In economic losses from floods 2000–2019, affecting 1.65 billion people and resulting in over 100,000 deaths. Over the same period, droughts affected another 1.43 billion people, with recorded estimated losses of nearly US$130 billion.

2.4 billion

People in urban areas face water scarcity by 2050 (up to half of global urban population)

153

countries share 286 transboundary river and lake basins and 592 transboundary aquifer systems, but only 58% of basin areas have an operational arrangement for water cooperation.